Interview with the Stormy Cast of The Weather Man

By Scott Huver, Hollywood.com Staff | Friday, October 28, 2005

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Nicolas Cage

Stormy Weather Man

For all his success alternating between starring roles in action extravaganzas like National Treasure and The Rock and quirky character turns in dramas like Adaptation and Leaving Las Vegas, there’s one kind of movie genre that you may be surprised that Nicolas Cage has been itching to take on.

“I've really wanted to make a family drama,” revealed the actor, who recently became a father again to the newborn (and heroically named) Kal-El with his third wife Alice, and is dad to 15-year-old Weston from former girlfriend Kristina Fulton. “That’s a genre that I think does the most good for people, because we can relate. We can go get a beer and maybe grow in some way, or learn something, but it's also the hardest kind of movie to make because it can lapse into saccharine. It can really be kind of Hallmark card or episodic TV shows. I don't want that at all.”

The Academy Award-winning actor got his wish when he found The Weather Man, an alternately funny and poignant, observant and existential study of callow Chicago weather forecaster--not a meteorologist, it’s important to distinguish. Cage plays Dave Spritz, who despite his seeming success in local television, sees himself paling in comparison to his revered and acclaimed author father (Michael Caine), alienated from his soon-to-be-ex-wife (Hope Davis), and unable to bond with his disconnected son and daughter. He even lacks a bond with his loyal viewers, some of whom often feel compelled to randomly and inexplicable fling fast food at him when they spot him on the street.

The sorry state of his life plunges him into a desperate, soul-searching bid to reconnect and rebuild the ruins of his relationships, with hardly a greeting card cliché or sappy sit-com sentiment in sight. “With my goal being the family drama and also my artistic aspirations of doing things which are a bit edgy, I found a really happy marriage in The Weather Man, because [director] Gore [Verbinski] went outside of the box and did something personal and artistic, but at the same time it hits all the right notes. It's sort of kids going through a divorce or husband and wife and what they're doing in a way that's not Pollyanna or saccharine or b.s.”

Partly Cloudy

Although Spritz’s entire life seems to revolve around his relationships--or lack thereof--with his immediate family, they do very little to help him make the kind of emotional connections he’s so desperate to establish.

“These characters are plotting against Dave Spritz as he makes his journey,” said Verbinski. “I think that he naively thinks that if one thing had changed, his life would be different--if he would have remembered that one thing. He is a shallow character who you want to smack and who you want to give a hug to at the same time. He is a sound-byte. He has to sum up something very complicated, which is the weather, and package it and distill it down and present it. And that process, I think, has contributed to the fact that he is trying to distill down his life, and predict it, and control it. He's trying to double down and roll the dice one more time and put it all together, and he's not seeing the bigger picture and complexities.”

Cage admits that he’s felt as stymied and frustrated as Dave at various points in his own life, under very similar circumstances, and that he specifically used this moviemaking experience to help him deal constructively with his baggage. “At the time that I agreed to do The Weather Man I was going through a divorce and I was trying to figure out how I could take the negative and turn it into a positive,” said the actor. “I had received the script for The Weather Man and I thought, ‘Oh, well, he's a parallel.’ Sometimes I do movies that can help me, like therapy, help me do something positive with a negative emotion. This film was an opportunity to just take all this well of feeling that I had and funnel it into this script. Dave and I have all these similar experiences, and so it became an overlay with my life and Dave Spritz’s life. ”

Scattered Showers

Verbinski said that once he and Cage sat down to discuss the project--they’d been hoping to work together for some time--it became obvious that the actor had a special connection to Spritz that couldn’t be underestimated. “He said, ‘I am this guy. I don't have to act this time,’” said the director. “He's been through marriages. He goes out and people harass him publicly. He's got father issues and he's struggling, like all of us, against mediocrity in our lives. So there was really no one else to play the part. I think that he just has a lot of personal experiences to draw upon to bring to this performance. He gets stalked by people in cars who go, ‘Hey! My girlfriend thinks that you're cute. I think that you're an asshole.’ So he has to deal with that.”

At least Cage hasn’t had to experience the random fast-food-flinging--thus far. “I wish that I could say all the time, but I've never had anything thrown at me,” admitted Cage. “At least not from someone that I've never met before. Yes, there have been times when in the past girls have thrown things--like glasses--at me.” But he did feel a definite connection to the character, especially in the way that he is recognized and reacted to by complete and total strangers nearly everywhere he goes.

“I don't relate in that I have bad relations with people on the street,” said Cage, saying that while his experiences don’t exactly echo ones like the scene in the film in which Spritz has a fan-provoked meltdown at the DMV, he recognizes the connection. “I try to make an effort to meet people well. I know that if it weren't for my fans I wouldn't be here, and so they are very important to me. And I know what it's like to meet someone that you admire and have them be complete jerks, and then I don't know if I can enjoy their work anymore. So I always want to meet people well and give a picture and sign every autograph, and it's a pleasure for me to do it.”

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